AMD roadmap tells us about the company had finished evolution of Socket AM3+ platform and FX processors. Vishera CPUs based on Piledriver microarchitecture is the last CPUs for this platform. We have tested the last additions in this lineup: eight-core FX-9370 and FX-9590 with monstrous TDP.

Conclusion

AMD has clearly left the market of top-performance x86 processors for the PC. The company has many plans concerning hybrid processors, energy-efficient microarchitectures for mobile devices, and ARM-based CPUs, but there are no conventional x86 CPUs for enthusiasts among them. We have to put up with the lack of alternatives. But before discontinuing its FX series AMD released the FX-9370 and FX-9590 models with increased clock rates, which emphasizes the key idea of the Bulldozer concept: a lot of relatively simple processing cores working at a high clock rate.

The FX-9370 and FX-9590 are not perfect due to the specifics of their microarchitecture, semiconductor die design and manufacturing process but we want to give them credit for delivering high performance in heavy multithreaded applications. Thanks to their high clock rates and eight (nearly full-featured) x86 cores, they are optimal for such jobs. If you use professional content authoring and processing suites for your work, you will find the FX-9370 and FX-9590 to be comparable to Intel’s senior Haswell-based products such as the Core i7-4770K and Core i5-4670K.

So we might recommend them for workstations if it were not for the fact that the FX-9370 and FX-9590 have no other advantages. Like their junior cousins, they are slow in applications which cannot use all of their x86 cores. They fall behind Intel’s CPUs at single-threaded loads. It means that AMD’s flagship CPUs are slow at everyday tasks such as office applications and popular 3D games.

Besides that, the FX-9370 и FX-9590 need many times as much power as their Intel opponents. You have to pay more for electricity and also need a better cooling solution. The overclocking potential is low as these CPUs are in fact pre-overclocked by the manufacturer to their very limit.

Summing everything up, the FX-9370 and FX-9590 lose to Intel’s top-end Haswell-based CPUs in their consumer properties and can hardly be interesting even for AMD’s loyal fans. AMD products can usually be used to build rather fast and cheap computers, but the senior Vishera-based CPUs are too expensive for that. They don’t offer anything that you don’t find in their more affordable FX series cousins except for the higher clock rates which don’t matter much in terms of practical performance. Moreover, all other FX series CPUs are Black Edition, so each of the less expensive 8-core AMD CPUs can be easily overclocked to about the same level as the FX-9370 or FX-9590.